It's taken some time coming but Google has announced it's extending its Google Apps online software suite for companies and organizations to non-profits.The announcement from the blog of...

The US administration's paranoid obsession with terrorism has gone too far with the Securities and Exchange Commission's link on state sponsors of terrorism. It's a knee-jerk reaction...

Conrad Black insists last week's verdict was just an aberration and that he will win ("The prosecutors lost most of their case and we move on to the Court of Appeals and expect to dispose of...

So Conrad Black has been convicted as a fraudster. For a neat summary of how the media responded to the verdict, go to Macleans.Now attention turns to the appeal and what he's likely to get. One...

When BusinessWeek and Forbes name their lists of "Best Managers" or "Best Performing CEOs", it could be the kiss of death. Not only for the CEO but the company and investors. That...

Earlier this year, I did a blog entry looking at the problems of forecasting the future. Forecasting, I said, was not so much a matter of predicting the future. It was more about exploring patterns...

Companies might be skilled at handling credit, market and financial risk, but they are hopeless when dealing with emerging risk issues of climate change, holding on to talent, and terrorism,...

Last month, the Australian Council of Super Investors, which represents the country's big industry super funds, had an interesting conference on corporate governance. One their guests, Stuart...

The number of securities class actions is down significantly, falling to well below average, according to a study by legal research firm Cornerstone Research and Stanford University Law School.So why...

Tense hours ahead for Conrad Black as he flips a bird at the media in the lead-up to the jury decision as whether he gets sent to jail for the rest of his life, or walks.The jury has been......

Crime doesn't pay. Well, for some. Contrary to claims that managers lie, cheat, cook the books and get away with it, a new study shows that individual perpetrators suffer huge consequences. Not...

At the beginning of this month, I raised the question of whether the private equity party is over. But the events of the past week have shown me that the reports of private equity's death are...

When organizations go bad, they usually succumb to one of six pathologies.1. Myopic organizations: These are the kinds of places where the leadership is in the grip of a protective stupidity, where...

The ghost of Enron lives on.It will be there when a US Senate sub-committee examines whether electronic energy exchanges should be subject to stricter rules. The problem goes back to 1993 when Enron...

A division of French cosmetic giant L'Oreal has been fined €30,000 ($US41,000) and one of its officers given a suspended three months prison sentence for systematic racial bias.L'Oreal unit...

In recent months, I have looked at how Sarbanes-Oxley's co-writer Michael Oxley has joined a law firm to help companies get around Sarbox, taken on another paid gig at Nasdaq and blamed the...

Earlier this week, I did a blog entry looking at allegations from a former Halliburton employee that the world's second-largest oilfield-services company had artificially inflated its revenues...

Lawyers are cashing in on climate change. Law firms around the US are getting ready for an explosion of work. Attorneys expect a bonanza of climate-related work tied to government regulation,...

What are the main characteristics of companies that engage in fraud? What are the tell-tale signs?A new study reveals that price-earnings ratios and market-to-book ratios are unusually high prior to...

New allegations about Halliburton. The oil-field-services giant has been accused of deliberately distorting its accounts through false accounting. Potentially, that could land the company in serious...